Rural Alabama teen Eddie, with two buddies in tow, gets into car racing and eventually reflects on his racing days with a psychiatrist in Charles’ novel.
At the novel’s open, 17-year-old Edwin, nicknamed “Fast Eddie,” walks to his new 1969 Plymouth GTX in the high school parking lot. He’s leaving the Cullman, Alabama, high school early to drive to his psychiatrist appointment 60 miles away. Eddie’s friend Cory begs to come along for the ride. Since “all trips began and ended at the Star Poolroom,” Eddie swings by that hangout and Mike, a few months older than Eddie and about to ship to Vietnam, joins the road trip. Along the way, Eddie gets into a road race with Cory’s deranged older cousin, Manfred, who also leads them to a house to settle a silly beef, where Eddie sees a woman he’d met during the difficult time when his mother died several years before. Eddie gives Mike the OK to drive Cory to bootlegging deals while going to the psychiatrist appointment. There, Eddie finally opens up to his psychiatrist, describing the night terrors that prompted these intensive appointments nine months ago. On the boys’ return trip home, Manfred rises up once again and another race ensues, leading to an empty church where Eddie encounters a spectral woman from his dreams. An epilogue shares the aftermath of this transformative trip for Eddie, his friends, and Manfred, both shortly thereafter and decades later.
Author Edwin Charles shares the forename of his protagonist, making one suspect that this finely observed narrative may be drawn from autobiographical material. The book is chock-full of enjoyable wry asides, such as Eddie noting, “Bootlegging had a long tradition in our county, it being dry with more than its share of Baptist hypocrites.” Charles also manages to pack in many flavorful folksy details (taking time to note the poolroom manager is “a short little poodle of a man, with the same lively disposition of a yappy little dog”) amidst generally adhering to his effective dramatic construction of alternating chapters that both push forward the trajectory of Eddie’s day and reveal his family’s backstory. Eddie, Cory, and Mike are entertaining age- and period-appropriate banterers and an ultimately touching triumvirate in the mode of Stand by Me or, perhaps a closer comparison, American Graffiti. Eddie’s dueling matchups against Manfred are cinematic experiences, with the boys involved in nail-biting close calls in “a blur of motion, noise, and nerves.” Eddie’s session with his psychiatrist serves as an important pit stop for him to articulate his pain, including a particularly striking sequence about his sleep paralysis (“The terror, the strangeness, the sadness and all the guilt just kept building”). One isn’t quite sure why Eddie feels guilt exactly, and this book’s epilogue has its abrupt elements (quick and ultimately jarring mentions of the existence/fate of each of the trio’s progeny). Overall, however, this is a masterful depiction of its time and place and Eddie’s grief and trauma at a critical crossroads of his life.
An immersive, highly suspenseful unfurling of a Vietnam War–era coming-of-age tale.
